Facebook’s Sandberg May Be Deposed in Antitrust Case

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg is scheduled to be questioned in a
lawsuit alleging that seven technology companies broke antitrust
laws by agreeing not to recruit from one another.

U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose, California,
yesterday allowed lawyers for employees suing the companies to
conduct the deposition around April 23. Google Inc. and Apple
Inc. are defendants in the case, along with Intuit Inc., Intel
Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar animation
unit and Lucasfilm Ltd. Neither Facebook nor Sandberg, who was
formerly an executive at Google, is a defendant.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case, which was filed in 2011,
already have questioned Google Chief Executive Officer Larry
Page, Lucasfilm CEO George Lucas and Apple CEO Tim Cook, among
other executives, according to court filings.

The lawyers have said that their pretrial information
gathering has confirmed that senior officers at the companies
personally entered into non-solicitation agreements to eliminate
competition for each other’s employees, kept the pacts hidden
from the workers, supervised the implementation of the plans and
policed each other.

The case mirrors claims the companies settled with the U.S.
Justice Department in 2010 after the government alleged that the
companies kept do-not-call lists to avoid competitive
recruiting, and that such agreements restrained competition,
which hurt employees.

U.S. Settlement

Lawyers for the employees have argued that while the
settlement with the federal government exposed the illegal
behavior and put an end to it, the agreement didn’t compensate
the employees who were harmed.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs had asked Koh to let them try to
schedule a deposition of Sandberg beyond a March 29 deadline for
fact-gathering in the case, saying that Sandberg and Facebook
didn’t respond to an earlier subpoena. They said a March 22
deposition of Page and a March 25 deposition of Intuit executive
Alex Lintner confirmed Sandberg’s “relevance” to the anitrust
case.

“Google believes that Ms. Sandberg is unlikely to offer
any testimony that would be admissible or lead to admissible
evidence,” according to a March 29 joint status report signed
by lawyers for the plaintiffs and defendants.

From March 22 to March 29, Google produced six documents
totaling 13 pages, including two spreadsheets concerning
compensation, three calendar entries and Sandberg’s employment
agreement with Google, according to the March 29 court filing.
Some Google documents sought by plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case
have been ruled off-limits because they are protected by
attorney-client privilege.

Sandberg was hired as COO of Facebook in 2008 and appointed
as the company’s first female director in June 2012. She is also
a director of Walt Disney.

Google VP

Before joining Facebook, Sandberg was vice president of
global online sales and operations at Google. Previously, she
served as chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department under
President Bill Clinton. She began her career as an economist
with the World Bank. The book she wrote, “Lean In: Women, Work
and the Will to Lead,” has climbed to No. 1 on bestseller
lists.

Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined yesterday to comment on the deposition
of Sandberg.

Both sides are waiting for Koh to rule whether the case
will proceed as a group lawsuit, with a proposed class of
employees including engineers, sous chefs, administrative
assistants and others.

The San Jose case is In Re High-Tech Employee Antitrust
Litigation, 11-2509, U.S. District Court, Northern District of
California (San Jose). The previous case is U.S. v. Adobe
Systems, 10-cv-1629, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia
(Washington).